There is not a little
confusion about the person of Coleridge's mother—this article attempts to
clarify the issue. In the autobiographical letters written at the request of
Tom Poole, Coleridge writes much and with warm feeling about his father, but
says little about his mother. He does say that he was “my mother's
darling”,[1] that she was an “admirable Economist”, [2] and that when he had been out all night after
his quarrel with his brother Francis and had all the neighbourhood looking for
him, that she was “outrageous with joy” [3]when he
was found, damp and cold by the River Otter.

In the first of these
letters he writes:

My family on my Mother's side can be traced up, I know
not, how far ‑ the Bowdens inherited a house‑stye & a pig‑stye
in the Exmore Country, in the reign of Elizabeth, as I have been told & to
my own knowledge, they have inherited nothing better since that time. [4]

As to this rather down‑putting
statement, we may dispose of it at once and assert that there is scene truth in
his account. There were many Bowdens or Bawdens in Devon and Somerset and in
Crediton there is a locality known since the 16th century at least as Bowden
Hill: in the Exeter archives is a deed recording the sale of an orchard “upon
Bowden Hyll in Crediton” dated 1555. There are also some Bowden entries in the
parish registers from their beginning to 1754, which would suggest that Anna
Bowden - Coleridge's mother - may have had relations in Crediton and at South
Molton a few miles away. The same can be said of his father, John Coleridge, to
which Coleridge bears witness: “My Father's Sister kept an every‑thingShop at Crediton” [5] Coleridge's account of his parentage continues
beyond the frankly autobiographical letters. In September 1799, writing again
to Tom Poole, he

[17]

says:

I have dined with a Mr Northmore, a pupil of Wakefield's,
who possesses a fine House half a mile from Exeter—in his Boyhood he was at my
Father's School—& my Great Grandfather was his Great great
Grandfather's Bastard. [6]

Gilbert Wakefield (1756 1801) was a famous
scholar of Cambridge and a well-known dissenter, suffering imprisonment for his
dissenting beliefs and publications. Like William Frend, whom Coleridge knew
and admired at Cambridge, he was deprived of his Fellowship at Jesus College,
because of his political and religious opinions. [7]

Coleridge's paternal
grandfather, John Coleridge (1697 1739), married a Mary Wills at Crediton and
became a woollen-draper at South Molton. In the Letters of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, edited in two volumes by E.H. Coleridge in 1895, is appended a
footnote – “probably a mistake for Crediton”. It is well nigh certain that it
was not a mistake and that Coleridge is accurate in his statement. Only a
little further on in the same letter he writes that his father left home to
earn his fortune and that “a passing gentleman carried him to the neighbouring
town” where he was set up as a schoolmaster, or more probably an usher, as he
was only 16 years old at the time. Coleridge then goes on to say: “Here too he
married his first wife” and the records for Crediton confirm this: “May 24th
1743, Rev. John Coleridge to Mary Lendon”. This would seem to confirm that the
“neighbouring town” to which Coleridge's father was taken was Crediton and
agrees with the statement that his grandfather did set up in business in the
wool trade at South Molton. In the 18th century South Molton was a thriving
centre for work and trade in wool: as the century progressed it encountered
severe opposition and by the 19th century it was at its peak with factories
established. Soon afterwards the industry declined and became almost
non-existent. Does this chime with the statement that Coleridge's grandfather,
as a woollen manufacturer, did become bankrupt and that this was

[18]

the
reason why his son left home for Crediton to make his own way in the world?
Certainly biographical accounts together with the economic history of South
Molton at the appropriate time, would seem to confirm the above sequence of
events. [8]

After his marriage in
Crediton John Coleridge was matriculated at Sidney Sussex College , Cambridge ,
was admitted “sizar” in 1748, and was no more than six months at Cambridge
before leaving to accept an appointment in 1749 as Master of Hugh Squier's
Latin School at South Molton. The records at Ottery St. Mary suggest that he
graduated B.A. but there is no other evidence to substantiate this. Hugh
Squier's Latin School was founded and endowed by the man whose name the school
bears, and was opened in 1686; later the Blue Coat School (1711) amalgamated
with it. Squier insisted that in the school he founded the teachers should pay
particular attention to “arithmetic and good writing”.

In 175I John
Coleridge's wife died whilst he was still Master of the School at South Molton,
where the records read: “June 15th, 1751, Mrs. Coleridge, wife to Rev, John
Coleridge”. Two years later, still in South Molton, he married again, this time
to Anne Bowden and it is at this point that I part company from accepted
opinion which says that she was the daughter of Roger Bowden and Mary Zeatherd.
My enquiries lead me to believe quite firmly that the young woman John
Coleridge married was Anne Bowden of South Molton, daughter of John Bowden. The
marriage tack place at St. Mary Arches in Exeter, and is recorded there: “Dec.
18th. 1753. Rev. Mr. John Coleridge of South Molton & Anne Bowden”. [1973
in the original article. Date substituted from Jim Mays ‘Was Coleridge’s Father
as simple as a Child’, Coleridge Bulletin
NS 21(NS) Summer 2003, 1-19, 5]. Even more explicit is the license for the
marriage: “John Coleridge of South Molton, clerk, and Ann Bowden of the same,
spinster”.

In September 1749 John
Coleridge had been ordained deacon and in December 1750 was ordained priest
with a lectureship at Molland along with his Mastership of the School at South
Molton. It was not until 1760 that he

[19]

and
his family moved to Ottery St. Mary where he was appointed Master of the King's
School and became Vicar of the Parish. Here he died in October 1781, and the
occasion is told in another of Coleridge's letters to Tom Poole.[9] The parish records read “Oct. 10th, 1781, Rev.
John Coleridge, late Vicar of this parish, aged 62” - this would suggest a
birth date of 1719, Which agrees with all that has gone before. It is further
recorded, and quoted in Lord Coleridge's Story of a Devonshire House,
that he was buried in the “Chancel, in front of the altar, a little to the
left, facing east, with Parson Gatchell”. In 1849 in process of work being done
at the time, the grave stone was removed to the entrance to the Lady Chapel.
His wife Ann survived him some 28 years and died on the 4th November 1809: she
was buried, as the records show, “Nov. 8th 1809, Ann, widow of Rev. John
Coleridge, aged 83”.

Ernest Hartley
Coleridge, son of Derwent Coleridge and grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
left some fragments designed to become a biography of his grandfather. These
fragments were published for the first time in the Centenary volume Coleridge:
Studies by Several Hands (1934) and serve as an introduction to the volume.
He tells of the marriage of his great grandfather to Ann Bowden and added “of
her parents we know nothing”. Lord Coleridge in 1906 produced his family
history Story of a Devonshire House in which he states that Ann Bowden
was the daughter of Roger Bowden and Mary Zeatherd and says that she was born
in 1727. We know, by the records at Ottery St. Mary, that Ann died at the age
of 83, and infer accordingly that the year of her birth must have been 1726. On
consulting the records of South Molton we find that there was an Ann Bowden,
baptised on the 8th May 1726 and we can suggest strongly that the child Ann,
born 1726 in South Molton and the aged mother of Coleridge who died in 1809 at
Ottery St. Mary, are one and the same person. Her father was John Bowden who
had twelve children born to him between 1718 and 1741. All were baptised at
South

[20]

Molton,
and as a family, prospered. About the year of Ann's birth - 1726 - a John
Bowden was Mayor of South Molton. Of the children, John settled in London, as
did a sister who married a London man. Another was a well-to-do farmer: a
William became Squire and was either a brother or a cousin of Ann. It is also
not unlikely that the Betsy Bowden to whom Coleridge refers as living with a
“Miss Cabriere, an old Maid of great sensibilities & a taste for
literature”, if not one of the two Elizabeths born to John Bowden, was named
for one of them. He writes further, recalling his days at Christ's Hospital, of
staying with “my Mother's Brother Mr. Bowden, a Tobacconist & (at the same
[time] clerk to an Underwriter. My Uncle lived at the corner of the Stock
Exchange ... He received me with great affection ... )” The letter states that
“He was a widower, & had one daughter ... Betsy Bowden.” [10]

In the 18th century,
Devon was home to many Dissenters, several of whom eventually made their way to
London. It is unlikely that John Bowden of South Molton was of their number
because he held a civic position as Mayor, and dissenters were precluded from
civic office. However, the kind of dissent which flourished in Devon at the
time was not of the extreme variety of Joseph Priestley who was to become Coleridge’s
hero. Rather they were Arian by persuasion and the tendency was not towards
Socinianism or Unitarianism."[11] Briefly, Arianis is a heresy very popular even
in orthodox circles and going back to the 4th century. The Arians held that
there was one God and that from that one God the divine Son drew all his
inspiration and attributes. It followed that, properly speaking, worship should
be paid to the Father alone. On the other hand Unitarianism believed in the “mere
humanity of Christ” which was something less than the honour given to Christ by
Arians.

In Crediton assemblies
of dissenters with no meeting houses met in their own homes or in barns. Sir
John Davie who had been in America, on returning to Crediton, entered upon the
Creedy estate and being on his own land was

[21]

able
to obtain a license for dissenting observances in 1718. When a meeting house
was built, timber from the estate was used. So numerous and active were
dissenters in Crediton and Exeter and Devon generally, that the Bowdens of Crediton
could not fail to have been aware of their activities. Under the rule of George
II, who would have no persecutions for religious opinions, dissent of the Arian
persuasion was not too seriously regarded, except among the dissenters
themselves. Many had little difficulty, as indeed is the case today, in
remaining within the Established Church. However, later in the century the
political attitude of Dissent became increasingly urgent, especially against
the rule of George III and his chief minister William Pitt the younger. The
proud dissenting motto of those days persists today and is frequently toasted
“Civil and Religious liberty, all over the world”.

Dissenters bitterly
resented, and were supported in this by others who were not dissenters, the frequent
suspension of Habeas Corpus, whereby persons could be arrested and imprisoned
without warrant or trial: the Two Bills, which forbade public meetings of more
than fifty people and prosecuted with the utmost rigour any expression of
sentiment hostile to Government and King.

It is not unreasonable to assume some kind of family
link between the Bowdens of South Molton, Crediton and Bowden Hill in the
latter town. A Bowden studied at the Taunton Dissenting Academy and in 1750 a
Rev. John Bowden died having been a much respected minister at Frome in
Somerset. In 1731 there was built on Bowden Hill in Crediton the first
Dissenting Chapel in Devon: inevitably it became known as the Bowden Hill
Chapel, and was only demolished in 1970. Jerom Murch in his History[12]
says that the chapel “is situated on an elevated ground called Bowden Hill, a
name by which it is called; this hill is between the east and west towns of
Crediton”. Photographs show it to have been a handsome cob building, with a
fine pulpit on the long wall facing the door. It would particularly attract the

[22]

intelligent,
thoughtful country middle-class, and it does appear that it was from just such
a strata in society that Ann Bowden came. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in the
fragments for a biography of Coleridge already quoted, says of Ann that “she
may have been an orphan, and lived with her uncle Hugh Bowden at Molland where
he kept a boarding school”. It will be remembered in support of this
suggestion, that when John Coleridge was Master of the School at South Molton
he also held a post which required him to lecture at Molland regularly. Was it
on one of these visits to lecture that John and Ann met? And what sort of
school did Hugh Bowden keep? It was a common practice for dissenters to make a living
and support their cause by keeping a school: many dissenting ministers ejected
from their pulpits in 1662 did so. In Devon and nearby Somerset there were
several schools of this character. Alexander Gordon truly notes that ministers
of the older Dissent, not merely in some cases but as a general rule, were the
educators in their several neighbourhoods. [13] There were several schools or Academies in the
area surrounding South Molton, as for example, at Exeter, Tiverton, Bridgwater,
Colyton, Taunton and further afield, but worth noting, John Prior Estlin,
Minister of Lewins Mead Chapel, Bristol, kept a school and one of his pupils
was Robert Southey who spoke highly of his teacher's ability.

Bowden Hill Chapel had
many fine pastors, including the saintly John Johns (1821-1836) who, called to
Liverpool, was alone with a Catholic priest in tending those dying of the
plague, when no one else would dare. He died of the plague. It is of interest
that William Hazlitt's minister father had connections with Bowden Hill and
returned there on retirement and died in 1820 and was buried at Creditor. John
Edwards, who had succeeded Joseph Priestley as Minister at Birmingham, and did
so much to help Coleridge in The Watchman venture in 1796, became minister at
Bowden Hill and on a holiday died at Ware in Dorset. Thomas Madge was at
Crediton before becoming Minister of the very important pulpit in Essex Street
Chapel, London.

[23]

Ann Bowden, if my
hypothesis be correct, and I see little to invalidate it, had much to contribute
to the intellectual as well as the physical upbringing of her son. The warm,
head-in-the-clouds figure of John Coleridge is well known; but few pause to
think of the “admirable economist” his wife, except in a derogatory style which
clearly emanated from Coleridge himself. Thomas De Quincey wrote that Coleridge
was “the son of a learned clergyman … It is painful to mention that he was
almost an object of persecution to his mother; why, I could never learn”. [14] This is at worst rubbish, at best a misinterpretation
of what Coleridge himself had told him. James Gillman, who became in 1816 a
very adequate substitute “father figure” for the inadequate drug addict
Coleridge had become, records in the biography he started, that “Mrs. Coleridge
was a very good woman - over careful - very ambitious for her sons - but
wanting perhaps that flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely”.[15] Coleridge himself underwrites what Gillman
recounted when he wrote that his father “had so little of parental ambition in him,
that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths &c, & had
accomplished his intention but for my Mother's pride and spirit of aggrandizing
her f amily”. [16] It was clearly a marriage of two persons of
widely different temperament: the man John Coleridge, forgetful, dreaming,
imaginative, romantic and Ann Bowden the very model of a dissenter, rational,
enthusiastic about education and determined that her children should have the
best possible - the “admirable Economist”.

It is, therefore,
suggested that Ann Bowden was of South Molton and the daughter of John Bowden,
possibly the Mayor of the town. Certainly she was influenced by Dissenting
opinions and life styles “plain living and high thinking”. Her care and
discipline for her children was essentially a dissenting characteristic. There
can be no doubt at all that John Coleridge fostered in his youngest son a love
of the romantic, even speculative, metaphysics later to be encouraged at
Christ's Hospital School - “I was from

[24]

the
first habituated to the Vast—& I never regarded my senses in any way as the
criteria of my belief.” [17] Even so, without the rational, thoughtful and
determined discipline of Ann Coleridge, he would not have become the genius who
influenced so greatly the thinkers of his time. His words in Table Talk
1834, the year of his death, came as a fruitful amalgamation of the two
principles:

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner… I can take no
interest whatever in hearing or saying anything merely as a fact – merely as
having happened. It must refer to something within me… I require in everything…
a reason, why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then
rather than elsewhere or at another time. [18]

[7] Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801) was a tutor at the Warrington
Dissenting Academy, 1779-1783 and at the Hackney Dissenting Academy 1786 until
he retired. Northmore (1766-1851) probably attended the Hackney Academy
although attendance at Warrington cannot be ruled out.

[8] See Official Guide to South Molton. It is worthy of note
that the town had a series of quite serious fires over this period. Was this
possibly a contributory factor to the bankruptcy of John Coleridge Snr?